Last week I had the opportunity to speak on a faculty panel to our university’s Board of Trustees. Our topic: shared governance. Perhaps your eyes are already glazing over. So, before you scroll away, I want to reassure you that that won’t be the focus of today’s contribution.
Well, mostly.
Traditionally, “shared governance” is the established term to describe the systems in place to make decisions at an academic institution between the main stakeholders: the board, the administration, the faculty. In more recent times, students and staff are often also included in considerations.
I bring this up because one of my roles on the panel was to trace out Calvin’s history in this area and to describe our particular “flavor” as compared to other institutions. Over my twenty-eight years here, I have had many roles (honors, head teaching fellow, department chair, Center director, etc) and served on committees and searches and Faculty Senate and taskforces, so I’ve had the privilege to help shape curriculum and policies and personnel.
To prepare for the panel, I reviewed one of our most foundational governance documents: a 1973 report produced by the Faculty Organization Study Committee (or in Calvin’s love for acronyms, FOSCO). The committee, inaugurated by Calvin’s then president, William Spoelhof, included future congressman Vern Ehlers as faculty chair alongside other noteworthy members of the faculty and administration. Together, they produced the first articulation of the principles and processes that, even as the college and higher education itself has changed, remain in the DNA of who we have striven to be: egalitarian, communitarian, and highly missional.
What’s more, though: I loved getting to name people then and over the last fifty years who have worked so hard to build something. Certainly, imperfectly. Certainly, in limited ways or with limited success. Me included. And yet, like the folks who populate the genealogies of the Bible, real people trying to do real work. In a time when the impulse towards destruction seems so prevalent, I was heartened to be able to give witness to the results of so many.
This week that principle of the “work of many hands” finds its expression for me in the opening of registration for this iteration of the Festival of Faith & Writing. Like my ruminations at the board last week, my mind always turns to remember the people who began what was to become the Festival in 1990—long before I or any of my current colleagues were anywhere near the English department—as well as the dozens and dozens and dozens who have contributed over the years. Nothing successful survives over decades without strong foundations and constant maintenance. Whenever something looks effortless, it’s probably exactly the opposite. I know that’s true for the FFW. Although I have been part of stewarding it, in small capacities and large, for many years now, it’s always been very much a shared endeavor. The questions we examine have been always evolving, but the essentials established in the very first gathering have remained. My current amazing team has found new ways to cultivate that legacy of generous hospitality to flourish beautifully.
It’s easy to dismiss or denigrate all the small things–meetings and memos and mobilizing–that it takes to build something institutionally. We make jokes–“For God so love the world, he didn’t send a committee.” We fail to recognize and appreciate the labor of the builders. Bartleby-like, we’d prefer not to.
And yet. George Eliot asks in Middlemarch: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” Surely, that is the question to guide our work. That, and the faithful example of those with whom we join our hands to do the messy work to which we’ve been called.
Photo by Karen Maes on Unsplash
14 Responses
” Nothing successful survives over decades without strong foundations and constant maintenance.” You are wise! Loyalty and a sense of mission are patiently built, not decreed and then enforced. Good governance relies on balance of power. I recall one of the organizational gurus of the current age saying something similar: If you want something done quickly and efficiently, do it yourself. If you want it to last, bring in all the stakeholders.
“For God so loved the world, he didn’t send a committee.” Actually, perhaps she did….. First came the Trinity, then some angel scouts, some socially unskilled prophets, a host of imperfect Bible-writers, some under-the-radar female advisors and role-models, and then some clueless disciples.
I love this rebuttal to the old joke. Lovely.
One of the jobs I had as a provost was explaining shared governance to incoming board members during their orientation. The parallels and nuanced differences among academic shared governance, Reformed polity, and the way constitutional democracies with three branches of government are supposed to work are striking and instructive. Any thriving institution owes a great debt of gratitude to those who did the largely invisible and often thankless work of participating in continuity and innovation.
A provost–one of the most thankless academic jobs–knows exactly how important it all is. Thank you!
I once put my testimony in this form, “I’m a Christian today because some committee of middle-aged to older church members met after work to plan for a Christian coffeehouse in downtown Sioux Falls. They had to hassle with things like rent agreements, paying utilities, hiring a director, raising funds, and other policies. I’m sure it was not much fun and didn’t seem all that important to them personally (it was for high school and college students). But God used that coffeehouse to transform my life.” God does send committees.
A gorgeous testimony!
Thank you for naming hope in medias res today, Jennifer.
Ah, that’s a more beautiful way of putting. Thanks, Kristy!
Jennifer, your invocation of Calvin College’s Faculty Organization Study Committee Report of 1973 brought back fond memories of the lively community discussion of FOSCO leading up to its final form. As editor of the student-faculty journal Dialogue, I wrote an impassioned editorial in February 1972 critiquing an early draft of FOSCO for being too “in loco parentis.” Afterward, Dean Vanden Berg invited me to his office for a genial discussion; he allowed that my analysis was largely correct, although he did not share my assessment. Later that spring, I joined a group of students who perched on the roof of the Commons above a sheet banner emblazoned with the motto: “Up Against the Wall, Mother Fosco!” I’m not sure we made much of an impact on the final report (though we did get our picture in the yearbook!). But I have always appreciated the way the College embraced student dissenters as a valued part of the family.
Oh, my–this story is a DELIGHT! I’m so grateful you shared it. I have to go find that picture in the yearbook. It’s interesting how much students show up in FOSCO, so I think y’all may have had an impact. But that’s my new favorite chant!
Glad you were able to slip in your beloved Middlemarch–and such a worthy quote! Even more glad you take it to heart.
❤️❤️❤️
In a spirit of dissent, here’s another definition of shared governance: no one’s in charge or wants to own a decision. My experience with shared governance in higher education is not as rosy. A small curricular change in the program for which I serve as “the director,” needed the sign off of seven layers of committees and took 3 years. In my experience in PK-12, the same level of change would involve less than half of those layers and taken maybe a year on the outside end. Higher education’s relevance gets questioned more and more often, and their inability to act quickly and decisively is not helping them. The market, however, does act quickly and decisively, especially for the 84 institutions that have closed in the past 5 years (cite: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/closed-colleges-list-statistics-major-closures/) . And many of these were smaller, liberal arts, private institutions.
My encouragement would be to build more innovative, responsive systems, lest an institution finds itself positioned not to build anything at all.
I wouldn’t disagree–dysfunctional governance can be destructive. I could have spent another essay talking about reforms I have been a part of to make things work better/more quickly/etc. Including very recently.
I’m just saying the work of building in unglamorous ways is important. And, as you note, will be even more so these days.